American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

by Maureen Callahan

Payne and Bell recognized Keyes’s threat as the mind control of an experienced criminal. Payne had learned it at Quantico and heard variations in countless confessions. “You’ll regret it.” “I’ll hurt you.” Neither is: “I’ll kill you,” and that gives a victim hope. The best criminals always leave that window open, because it makes manipulating and controlling someone so much easier. And victims often believe, fatally, that they’ll be let go.

If an Israel Keyes existed, someone even more diabolical would follow. They needed to understand the forces that built Israel Keyes, the first sui generis serial killer of the twenty-first century.

Keyes had told investigators that there were two texts that he studied closely, both written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI: Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, and Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas, in turn the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

Compulsive driving—this stood out to Bell. It had seemed so specific to Keyes, yet Hazelwood explained that this was a shared tendency among psychopaths, feeding an overarching need for control, freedom, and constant visual stimulation to counter the boredom they so often feel.

Before his death in 2016, Hazelwood spoke about Keyes. Hazelwood’s decades of service had left him with a cynical view of the FBI’s truthfulness in general, and he believed stranger abductions are far more common than the Bureau insists.

He believed that technology, the mainstreaming of violent pornography, advances in ever-faster travel, and an overall culture of misogyny, from politics to entertainment, would only continue to breed more aberrant and dangerous criminals. He made this prediction in 2001.

Not all psychopaths are serial killers, but all serial killers are psychopaths.

The youngest subject Hazelwood knew to exhibit psychopathic behavior was a three-year-old caught by his mother in the act of autoerotic asphyxiation. That toddler grew up to become a serial killer.

What Keyes was describing was the textbook progression, from childhood, of a sadist and a psychopath. Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans.

There’s nothing I can do. No sentiment captured this stage of the investigation more. Bell couldn’t get Chandler to do his job. Payne couldn’t get Feldis out of the room. Keyes couldn’t fire his attorney or get an execution date. There was no one in charge, not one person or panel or institution that could fix it.

Bell and Payne maintain that Keyes murdered eleven people and that the twelfth skull was likely his. They believed Keyes when he said his final number was “less than a dozen.” To Payne, ever the math guy, a dozen was always a weird number; most people count by fives or tens. Less than a dozen, to him, meant eleven. Other agents who worked this case, Gannaway and Chacon among them, believe Keyes killed far more people than that.